But not LA, this time. Do you know the way to San Jose? I do. Fly into SFO via Dallas, rent car, and down the 101.

Excuse me. Make that down 101, just so the locals don't confuse me with one of those degenerate hicks from southern California. In Sherman Oaks, it's the 101, but no definite article is required in Silicon Valley. I've always wondered, driving up, just where it loses the "the." I'm guessing somewhere around Paso Robles.

Anyway, that digression aside, I may do some conference blogging, but I'm there to schmooze mainly. I will feel an obligation to write up interesting things that go on there at some point, though. I have a press pass waiting. I hope.

Rand

See ya there. Will be on a panel with Muncy and Cowing tomorrow afternoon.

Dennis

Rand,

Try to make it to Michael Balch's talk about his senior design project. He's one of our recent VT grads (May '06) and is now a grad student here. He and his senior design team won First Place for their design of a tether decelerator system for sample return missions.

Have a wonderful time.

Chris

The highway references do, indeed, lose the article about there - my wife is from San Luis Obispo, and those of her age group, especially including the employees of CalTrans, sort of the 'family business' on her side - sensibly refer merely to the highway number.

There are implied verbs in English, e.g "I am taller than he [implied 'is']" but I have yet to see implied nouns as in "Take the 101 [implied 'freeway']."

What can you expect from Southern Cal, anyway? They are short on water, but have a surfeit of articles.

101S or get to 280S. Either one will get you to San Jose.
Shame you didn't or couldn't get a ticket to San Jose Airport.

A friend from SoCal who now lives in the Bay Area says the cutoff line is the Grapevine. Or at least that's his line - up here he'll say "101" but as soon as he goes over teh GRapevine it's "the 101".

Funny, I guess my view is so SoCal-centric that, even going to school up north, I never noticed that people left out the "the." Until this post, I had no idea that someone might not call it "the 101." I guess growing up in Santa Barbara, where the only freeway is "the 101," might have contributed.

Enjoy it. I'll be trying to balance the coastal loads by attending:

http://history.nasa.gov/socimpactconf/index.html

-Monte
http://montedavis.livejournal.com

Rand,
Be sure to come over to the Education Alley side of the exhibits. We're there showing 3000 kids how they can build their own suborbital payload modules.

-MM

Well, welcome to San Jose, from a local(ized) reader!

Hope you have a good time.

Norm

Took my chances on a big jet plane
Never let them tell you that they’re all the same
The sea was red and the sky was grey
Wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today

(source)

In Houston, we don't use articles for numbered highways, but we do sometimes use them if the highway has some sort of name. For instance, if your heading to JSC, I would say, "take I-45 south to NASA Parkway", or "take the South Freeway to NASA Parkway".

The other NoCal/SoCal difference I noticed (having lived in both parts) was that California Highway 1 is "Highway One" in the North, and always "Pacific Coast Highway" or "PCH" in the South. Highway One has various official designations in the north but people hardly ever use them.

Local usage is quite variable; Chicago commuters know the Eisenhower and the Dan Ryan, but would never call them I88 or I90. Oakland CA seems to use the Nimitz and 880 about equally, but I've never heard 680 called the Sinclair Freeway, nor 580 called the Arthur Breed. The Eastshore Freeway is, so far as I am aware, always called 80.

Bridges are worse - The Benicia Bridge across the Sacramento River, carrying 680, is officially the "George Miller Junior Memorial Bridge" while the new bridge carrying 80 over the Sac river at Carquinez is officially the "Al Zampa Memorial Bridge", named for an iron worker who worked on a lot of the Bay Area bridges. Neither is commonly called anything but 'Benicia bridge' or 'Carquinez bridge'.